CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-26483 — gosaml2 is a Pure Go implementation of SAML 2.0

Medium CVSS 5.3

gosaml2 is a Pure Go implementation of SAML 2.0. SAML Service Providers using this library for SAML authentication support are likely susceptible to Denial of Service attacks. A bug in this library enables attackers to craft a `deflate`-compressed request which will consume significantly more memory during processing than the size of the original request. This may eventually lead to memory exhaustion and the process being killed. The maximum compression ratio achievable with `deflate` is 1032:1, so by limiting the size of bodies passed to gosaml2, limiting the rate and concurrency of calls, and ensuring that lots of memory is available to the process it _may_ be possible to help Go's garbage collector "keep up". Implementors are encouraged not to rely on this. This issue is fixed in version 0.9.0.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.3 (3.1)
Published
2023-03-03
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-409

Affected products

  • gosaml2_project / gosaml2

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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